While Paine focused his style and address towards the common people, the arguments he made touched on prescient debates of morals, government, and the mechanisms of democracy.[25] This gave Common Sense a "second life" in the very public call-and-response nature of newspaper debates made by intellectual men of letters throughout Philadelphia. Paine's formulation of "war for an idea" led to, as Eric Foner describes it, a torrent of letters, pamphlets, and broadsides on independence and the meaning of republican government…attacking or defending, or extending and refining Paine's ideas.”[26] [27]
John Adams, who would succeed George Washington to become the new nation's second president, in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work".[28] Others, such the writer calling himself "Cato", denounced Paine as dangerous and his ideas as violent.[29] Paine was also an active and willing participant in what would become essentially a six month publicity tour for independence. Writing as "The Forester", he responded to Cato and other critics in the pages of Philadelphian papers with passion, declaring again in sweeping language that their conflict was not only with Great Britain, but with the tyranny inevitably resulting from monarchical rule.[30]